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Article Excerpt
In Charlotte Smith's first novel, Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, the heroine finds herself caught between her obligations to competing forms of male "protection." Emmeline, seemingly illegitimate, has promised her uncle and guardian, Lord Montreville, that she will not marry his son Delamere without his and Lady Montreville's consent; however, she also has promised Delamere, despite her misgivings, that she will marry him in a year's time, if at the end of that year his affections have not waned. Both promises are coerced. Her promise to Montreville is part of an agreement that will allow Emmeline to refuse marriage from "pecuniary motives" to a man of her uncle's choosing. (1) Her promise to Delamere is an act of desperation: she fears, rightly, that if she does not consent the "violence of his nature" (185) will lead to Montreville's withdrawal of all financial security. Emmeline clearly understands her obligations to paternal authority, as well as her position as an object exchanged between men. She begs Delamere to relinquish his resolve to marry her so that her only honorable means of subsistence is not threatened: "give me back to the kindness and protection of your father" (187, my emphasis). However, she must constantly prove to Montreville that she is worthy of that "kindness and protection": "His Lordship therefore sent her ... a bank note of fifty pounds; with his thanks for the propriety of her conduct, and an assurance, that while she continued to merit his protection, he should consider her as his daughter, and take care to supply her with money, and every thing else she might wish for" (103). Montreville's symbolic and practical support always is contingent upon Emmeline's adherence to her duty. Thus, her promises to Montreville and Delamere cast the heroine's reliance on patriarchal authority in the language of the gift and obligation, depicting these relations as ostensibly based on filial affection, rather than on the coercive and violent qualities that motivate this authority throughout the novel.
The contract made before the novel begins--Montreville's acceptance of Emmeline as his ward and the agreement to send monthly payments of support--appears as a gesture of paternal benevolence. Thus, as Emmeline attempts to assert her will in situations that determine the course of her life, specifically who and when she will marry, she is compelled to balance her self-interest with the obligations she owes to Montreville for his generous guardianship. Significantly, Montreville's real motives for supporting Emmeline remain unknown for much of the novel; because the initial gifts are exchanged before the narrative begins, Emmeline's conception of duty appears to be a natural consequence of her position. Both narrative form and social practice disguise her return gifts of obedience as virtuous gestures inspired by filial loyalty. In this respect, the absence of the original exchange and the obfuscation of Montreville's intentions create a fiction of generosity that in turn disguises his lack of both legal authority over Mowbray Castle and paternal authority over Emmeline. In this sense, the novel displays the complex system of debt, obligation, and authority that, as I have argued elsewhere, informed eighteenth-century conceptions of gift exchange and obligation. (2) By framing Emmeline's obligations as gratitude, the novel makes clear that she has no real "choice" when it comes to determining her will. She must always defer to the dynamics of obligation owed for the name, money, and protection that allow an apparently illegitimate female orphan to escape the harsh realities of eighteenth-century life: starvation or prostitution.
In this essay, I argue that the complexities of gift exchange and obligation underwrite, reinforce, and strain against the literary form of the late eighteenth-century novel. Drawing on Caroline Levine's incisive rethinking of the methodologies of literary criticism, I examine the debts and obligations engendered by the asymmetrical logic of the gift in Emmeline, and the problems of ideology and form in Smith's novel? Levine argues for a "strategic formalism" that attends to form's "shaping patterns, to identifiable interlacings of repetitions and differences, to dense networks of structuring principles and categories" while allowing for the ways that "historical texts, bodies, and institutions are organized." (4) Over the past decade, debates about formalism and cultural studies have either moved implicitly toward this understanding, or brought to our attention the stakes involved in not recognizing the ways in which "social forms and literary forms are always potentially embedded within one another." (5) Strategic formalism, while not rejecting completely totalities, potentially produces "an array of unexpected and unintended difference," specifically through the encounter of ostensibly competing methodologies. (6) In Smith's novel, the various narrative elements--sentimental fiction, the gothic, and social critique--do not resolve themselves into a coherent aesthetic whole, but instead call attention to the tensions between narrative form and novelistic content.
The conflict between Emmeline's anxiety-provoking obligations and promises to various men and to a larger patriarchal ideology and the gifts she receives is a product of what Pierre Bourdieu identifies as the "guaranteed misrecognition" of social practice. In his revisionist critique of structuralism, The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu identifies gift exchange as a social practice that mediates relations of domination through a collective process of "guaranteed misrecognition." Gifts are exchanged within an economy that requires a return gift, thus enacting an ongoing cycle of exchange, as each new gift demands a gesture of reciprocity. The potential burdens of this cycle of reciprocity on both the giver and the receiver require a denial during the very process of exchange. According to Bourdieu, in order for gift exchange to function as a disinterested gesture with the potential to mediate non-material values, such as love, sacrifice, and friendship, gifts must be exchanged under "a veil of enchanted relations"; the true nature of the obligation to reciprocate must go unrecognized to prevent the gifts from functioning as coercive and exploitative conduits of violence. Bourdieu views gift exchange as "one of the social games that cannot be played unless the players refuse to acknowledge the objective truth of the game." The "guaranteed misrecognition" of gift exchange as disinterested enforces a social practice of exchange that functions symbolically to negotiate issues of rank, honor, and prestige. This misrecognition is aimed at "transmuting the inevitable and inevitably interested relations imposed by kinship, neighbourhood or work, into elective relations of reciprocity, through the sincere fiction of a disinterested exchange, and more profoundly, at transforming arbitrary relations of exploitation (of woman by man, younger brother by elder brother, the young by the elders) into durable relations, grounded in nature." The fictions that Bourdieu describes allow the obligation inherent in gift exchange to be transmuted "by and into gratitude and reciprocal sincerity," and the natural laws of opposition and domination are ostensibly displaced by mutual affection and voluntary relations. (7)
Consequently, in Emmeline gifts are mistaken for filial benevolence and the heroine's promises for reciprocal feelings. Because the ongoing exchange of gifts and promises in the novel takes place against the backdrop of the heroine's presumed illegitimacy, Emmeline appears as if she can resist patriarchal control and gain an upper-class husband through her adherence to virtue. However, I want to claim that the ideology of obligation reveals both the fictions of reciprocal obligations between men and women and the ideological coerciveness of the novel's plot and narrative form: that the seemingly disinterested exchanges mask the impossibility that Emmeline can escape the asymmetrical cycle of exchange that subjects her to competing forms of male control.
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